Porton Biopharma opens new facility to make more of its childhood cancer cure

In a ribbon cutting ceremony, John Glen MP for Salisbury and South Wiltshire today (27th April 2018) officially opened Porton Biopharma Limited’s (PBL) new fermentation facility which will be used to manufacture the company’s life-saving leukaemia drug Erwinase®.

The state-of-the-art facility has been designed and built around a new 3000 litre fermenter which is a significant increase over existing capacity and will enable PBL to increase the amount of product it will be able to manufacture in the future.

The new multi-million pound building has a footprint of approximately 2100m2. This includes the main fermentation hall, down-stream processing rooms for harvesting product, plus all the associated services of purified water, steam, air and effluent treatment that are required in a modern pharmaceutical facility that meets the latest regulatory standards. These systems have been designed to interact seamlessly and are operated by the latest process-control system. This will enable PBL’s production technicians to easily view and control any of the component parts via a series of hi-tech interactive screens.

Mike Raine Director of Engineering for PBL said “Today represents an important milestone where we can see the physical results of all the hard work in the design, planning and build that have gone into this project. We are now looking forward to the next challenge of qualifying and validating the equipment to ensure that everything is working as specified, before going into full production sometime over the next year.”

Commenting on the ceremony John Glen said, “I was delighted to be welcomed back to open this new facility after having performed the ground-breaking ceremony in May 2016, the transformation of the site is astounding. Having this facility in Wiltshire is also a superb local example of the government’s industrial strategy, which specifically includes supporting the life-sciences sector and building prosperous communities – a good news event for Salisbury!”.

Dr Roger Hinton MD of PBL said “We are looking forward to the day when this facility comes on-line because that, along with the other investments that we have made, means that we will be able to meet the growing global demand for our product. This helps to grow the value of Porton Biopharma Limited, but most importantly it means that we will be able to save the lives of more children who suffer from this form of leukaemia in future.”

Combination products are therapeutics that combine two or more products (drug/device, biologics/device, biologics/drugs, or drug/device/biologics), regulated and sold as a single unit. Examples of combination products include drug-coated implantable devices, drugs packaged with delivery devices in medical kits, and drugs and devices packaged separately but intended to be used together.More info >>

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